


The New Gardener

by Calais_Reno



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Character Death, Don't copy to another site, Gardens & Gardening, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, M/M, Old Age, Post-Reichenbach, Reminiscing, Reunion, Separations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:01:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25225729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calais_Reno/pseuds/Calais_Reno
Summary: He has come for me, at last.
Relationships: John Watson/Mary Morstan (past), Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 23
Kudos: 80





	The New Gardener

1932

It is not often these days that one hears the name Sherlock Holmes. That is perhaps a good thing, after so many years of merciless defamation and scandal. In those bad old days, I wrote many letters to the papers, decrying the lies and defending him, but it was all in vain. The years have silenced those falsehoods, but not corrected them. He died in ignominy and was forgotten without ever being forgiven.

I am the only one left who believed that he was not guilty. All the accusations that were made, both before and after he plunged over the falls at Reichenbach— that he was a fraud, that he created crimes to increase his fame, that he ruined Moriarty’s reputation to enhance his own— all were fictional. He was a brilliant man, the best I’ve ever known.

Mycroft is gone, dead soon after his brother’s fall, discredited, penniless. Lestrade was demoted and applied for retirement as soon as he could scrape together enough to buy a cottage in Essex. He is dead too, as are all those others— Dimmock, Gregson, Hopkins, the men who supported those terrible charges.

And now I am dying as well.

I used to write. For a time, my tales of our adventures could be found in the pages of _The Strand_ magazine. I may have romanticised those days, but truth often is romantic, even when not embellished. For a time, I wondered if my reputation might depend on the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. That would have been a life, to retire still putting my pen to the page, recording our many adventures. At one time I complained to him that there were too many cases, that he should take a hiatus to let me catch up. Later, my stories were rejected. No one any longer believed in him. His stories, his true adventures, had become lies. I could not find a publisher who would read anything I’d written.

His fall was the end of my old life and everything that was good in it. Friends shunned me, enemies repeated the lies. But these were the least of what I endured; I could have borne what our life together would have become, had he lived.

I moved to Scotland and set up practice in a small village where no one knew me. My heart was broken. I tried to find solace in caring for the villagers and the farmers. Eventually, I married. She was a good woman, my Mary, a better and kinder person than I ever was. We had a son, William, and a daughter, Rosemary. Our third child died even as she was being born, taking her mother with her. I named her Mariam, _bitterness._ Twice bereaved, I never considered remarrying; instead, I raised Billy and Rose by myself.

Billy died in the Great War, along with Rose’s husband Jack. She did not seek another husband. Her temperament is much like mine: we are not quick to love, but give our hearts completely when we do. Like her, I have only once given my heart completely.

Over the years, we have silently sustained one another in our grief. But even she does not know that when I sigh _my dearest_ , I am not thinking of Mary. When I weep, she believes that it is for her brother, taken too soon. I grieved my wife and my son properly and finally put my sorrow for them to bed. But for him, _my dearest_ , I never was able to grieve as I ought. I put on mourning, but my tears were all shed in private.

It is a warm day for the first week of November. Rose bundles me into my jacket and sits me in the old rocking chair we keep on the porch. She tucks a blanket around me and says, “I’m going to Campbells. The little ones are poorly and I’ve made a batch of syrup for their throats. I won’t be an hour. Will you be all right here, by yourself? I’ve made you a pitcher of lemonade.”

“Tea,” I say.

In a few minutes, she sets a mug in my hand, looks into my face, searching for signs of pain.

“How are you feeling today? You look tired.”

“Yes, tired,” I reply. “When you get home, I’ll lie down for a bit. Until then, I’m fine sitting here.”

She wants to know my pain level, but that will make me grumble and she has heard enough of that since I became ill. There is no patient worse than an old doctor. She needs to be out of the house for a while, to talk with people who are still alive and eager for the coming holidays. My Rose is smart and full of compassion for those who suffer. She might as well be a doctor; she knows as much as I do about the ailments that afflict our neighbours. But she never went to university; it wasn’t the life she planned to live. Still, the villagers treat her with respect; she is the one who delivers their babies and brings comfort to the dying.

The sun is warm and I sit surveying the garden and the near woods, enjoying the colours of autumn. This is a beautiful place, this cottage where I’ve spent my last years. Once it belonged to Mary’s family. After I die, Rose will keep it. For now, it is my domain, a small, safe world away from the larger world of war and grief and loss.

The new gardener is cleaning out the rows of vegetables, taking all the dead vegetation and creating a compost heap. He is a lean man, tall but a bit stooped, with grey hair. In his posture I see a man who has had a hard life. I used to do all the gardening myself; it was my consolation in the lonely years after the war ended, when Billy didn’t come home. This past spring, however, it became too much. That was when I first knew that the cancer was eating me from the inside. The pain was not great then, but I had never felt so weak. I struggled on in the early summer, preparing the beds, settling the young plants in the ground. Finally, when the days were longest, I let it go. A week ago, Rose said she’d hired someone to come and clean out the old plants.

“If he’s any good,” she said, “we’ll have him back in the spring to plant the vegetables. Think about what kind of flowers you’d like as well.” She said this only to make me think less about dying. I do not expect to survive the winter. I am almost relieved that it is finally ending. I never expected to live so long.

Sitting here, I doze and dream of him. I stopped writing years ago, on paper, but since then I have remembered those years in detail and told those stories to myself. I remember the nights when we ran through the allies and streets of London, tracking down criminals. I remember the clients that his work brought in, some illustrious, even royal. I remember train rides and telegrams and thinking there was no one I loved more. I remember our first careful kisses, our shy confessions, and the desire that finally tumbled us into his bed.

I see him sitting in his chair, a fire blazing before us. I hear his voice, saying, _Watson, listen to this!_ And I hear his laugh, recognise the pure joy he felt when the puzzle was solved, the criminal apprehended. The fickle world had not yet begun to turn against him. There was no Moriarty, no slander, no accusations to tear his heart and make him desperate. It was for me that he fell, I later perceived. He did not want me to go down with him.

The gardener has stuck his fork in the ground and is wiping his brow. He leans against a tree, smoking a cigarette, and when our eyes meet, I have a sense of deja vu.

He is coming towards the house now, his lanky legs covering the ground with more ease that you would expect, given his age. One of his legs has a hitch in it, and he limps slightly. I have limped for years, a consequence of a Jezail bullet that found its way into my leg in Afghanistan. I can hardly remember ever walking without pain, except for the years I lived with Holmes. When the game was afoot, nothing could keep me from his side.

His shadow darkens my spot on the porch. I cannot see his face well with the sun at his back, but my eyes are poor now.

“You’re the new gardener,” I say.

He nods.

“Where are you from?”

“Here and there,” he says. “I was born in Kent.”

His accent is not that of a day labourer. “You’ve lived in London.”

“I have. Not for many years, though.”

I invite him to sit, offer the lemonade. “The winter will be colder than recent years,” I observe.

He accepts the glass, mops his face with a handkerchief. “Change is the essence of life.”

I nod my agreement. Our silence feels comfortable, as if we were two friends sitting at the fire, sipping tea, friends who are content to sit in silence, knowing each other’s thoughts without speaking.

“You are ill,” he says.

“I will not survive the winter. It’s a blessing, truly.”

“You look forward to dying, to heaven?”

I smile. “I do not fear heaven or hell. The world after this one must be wider than those two paths. There is no judgment. There is only reunion, I hope.”

I look at him, and finally I see him. He is more real than all my memories and imaginings. This is not the Sherlock who plunged over the falls to save me, it is an older Sherlock who has suffered too much. In the creased lines of his face, I see that suffering, but I can see the younger man, too.

“I never stopped loving you,” he says. “I never loved another.”

“Sherlock,” I say, because there is no other word I can utter, no question I can ask, no cry I can give that will express what I am feeling. “Oh, my dearest love.”

His eyes are sad. He kneels at my feet and takes my hands in his. “I wanted to come back, but I could not. They knew I was alive, and sought to kill me. I only hoped to see you one day. Please forgive me.”

I do not hesitate. “There is nothing to forgive.” I have never blamed him for what happened. Here, at the end of my life, I feel only happiness that he has returned. For years I have imagined our life as it might have been. “All this time. Where have you been?”

“At first,” he says, “I stayed in Europe. I wandered through the French countryside, hiring myself out as a gardener or dayworker. I had no money, no identity. I was a dead man with no name. Eventually, I came back to England to look for you. You were married, and I was still in disgrace, so I stayed away. At one time, I hoped to grow old with you, John.”

“I used to imagine it,” I said, weeping. “Nothing could have kept me from you, had I known you were alive.”

“Come, love,” he says. “Walk in the garden with me.”

I close my eyes, shaking my head. Tears wet my cheeks. “I can barely walk, my dear. I’m almost too weak to stand.”

He takes my hand then. “Come walk with me, John.”

I hold tight to his hand. The garden is very green and fragrant, I notice. There are new flowers beginning to bloom— daisies and dahlias and yarrow, lilies and roses. It’s the most beautiful garden I ever planted.

He raises me to my feet, but it’s no effort, really. Standing easily, I pull him close to me. Our lips meet in a kiss that has waited too long. I breathe in the scent I have never forgotten — tobacco and lime and Macassar oil— and look into the eyes I love, pale to translucency, like an opal. I kiss the lips that curve into a smile. It has been far too many years.

The arms that embrace me are young and strong, as they were before, in those too short days I remember so well.

Thinking of my Rose, I look back at the house. There I see myself, slumped in my chair, and I know that he has finally come for me. Years of grief and suffering have separated us, but now nothing can take him away from me.

He beckons to me, urging me to follow him. The bees hum. The scent of flowers fills the air. I clasp his hand and see myself, young again. We go together, as ever it should have been, into a new world where we will never want for time.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a long time ago and put it aside not because only it was sad, but because I began to think of a different way this could have gone. 
> 
> Last year I began writing Fin de Siecle, the story of Holmes's fall and return from the dead. In that story, as in this one, Holmes loses his battle against Moriarty and Moran, and only returns when years have passed. Meanwhile, John has suffered too. That story is complete, posted here as a series.
> 
> I found inspiration for this story in the beautiful [**And After**](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16347428) written by regshoe.


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